Rising Segregation Is Found for Hispanic Students

By KAREN DE WITT,

Published: January 9, 1992

WASHINGTON, Jan. 8—
Segregation of Hispanic students in the nation's public schools has grown over the last two decades while gains in desegregation among blacks in the South have remained largely stable, a study released today has found.

"Hispanics in California and Texas are more segregated than blacks in Alabama or Mississippi in terms of educational experiences," said Dr. Gary Orfield, an author of "Status of School Desegregation: The Next Generation." The study, which analyzed 20 years of school enrollment data collected by the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, was sponsored by the National School Boards Association.

New York, New Jersey, Texas and California, Dr. Orfield said, were the states where Hispanic segregation was most intense. Among the reasons for the growing segregation of Hispanic children, who in the last 20 years have come to account for 10 percent of the nation's students, he said, were that they were increasing rapidly in number and were concentrated in some areas. Fifty-seven percent of the nation's Hispanic residents live in California and Texas.

"Hispanic segregation has been steadily increasing," he said. "It is more serious for Puerto Ricans than for Mexican-Americans, but it is growing for Mexican-Americans as well."

He said that in 1988 and 1989, 10 percent more Hispanic students than black students attended schools where whites were a minority. "Since 1970," he said, "the percent of whites in the school of the typical Hispanic student has fallen by 12 percent, while the level has remained relatively stable for blacks."

School districts in inner cities have grown increasingly segregated because of demographic changes like white flight to the suburbs and an overall decline in the number of white students, Dr. Orfield said, but he added that a pattern of segregated schools was also occurring when minorities moved to the suburbs.

"We can't think of the suburbs as white any more," said Dr. Orfield, a professor of education and social policy at Harvard University and a leading expert on school desegregation. "The country is becoming more racially diverse. And the most rapidly changing school districts are suburban."

Dr. Orfield said the study showed that Federal desegregation efforts had produced more integrated schools in the 38 years since the Supreme Court found that segregated schools were inherently unequal and that places where desegregation efforts were mandatory had the most stable, long-term success with integration. He said such efforts had turned the schools of the South, once the most segregated in the country, into the most integrated.

He also said that after the 1970's the Federal Government had relaxed its efforts to enforce school desegregation, but that despite that relaxation, "there was no significant reversal of integration of blacks in schools in the 1980's."

But Dr. Orfield said that he believed that the stability of school integration might be undermined by moves by the Federal courts to return desegregation responsibilities to local school boards.

The report also addressed the status of Asian students, concentrated in California, and the most rapidly growing group of students in the nation'sschools.

" There's now half again as many Asians as blacks in the state of California," Dr. Orfield said. "They're not segregated significantly. They tend to be very well integrated in schools, and that's one of the things we should think about when we think about the remarkable mobility that they've achieved into the mainstream of American society."

Dr. Orfield said that because the United States was becoming a multiracial society, the enactment of a new Federal program was necessary to maintain school integration.

He also recommended a major study of the effects of segregated schools on Hispanic students, a comprehensive program that considered housing patterns in an effort to support stable suburban school integration and a major upgrading of Federal statistics on the racial makeup of schools.